My cell phone rang at two minutes of four in the morning. I swiped my thumb across the green ‘answer’ button, put the phone to my ear and grunted.
“Meow?” came the reply. It was my cat.
“Waffles?” I cleared my throat and sat up. I hadn’t heard from my cat in two months.
“Meow.” She sounded sad and exhausted and I could guess why. She’d gotten herself a job and apparently she was—predictably—in over her head.
“You’re not going to try to tough it out?” It was kind of cruel of me to string her along. We both knew she couldn’t handle this.
“Meow.” It was a long, drawn out meow. Almost like back in the days when she still lived with me and her food bowl wasn’t entirely full and she desperately needed me to cover the entire bottom of the dish with kibble.
“Okay, okay. I’ll be there by tomorrow.” I hung up. I hadn’t said ‘I told you so.’
*** (more…)
Author: emosher
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The Cat Came Back
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What Kind of Mother
I had thought I was doing right by Levi—I took him to church, to concerts, museums—but here is a severed rat leg telling me otherwise. (more…)
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Two Stories, Two Styles
I finished two short stories this month! That’s a lot for me. I tried different approaches for both of them because 1) I am attempting to find my voice as a writer and 2) I am like a writing shark. If I stop, I just don’t start again. Also I eat suits of armor.
The first story, I used a technique I learned in a creative writing course in college and broke down a story by Jhumpa Lahiri into its most basic components (i.e. PROTAGONIST with PHYSICAL PROBLEM does THING) and then imposed my own plot and characters on the bare skeleton of the original story. Her story involved a refugee woman living in a poor neighborhood in India. Mine involved a washed up opera singer in a traveling theatre group in a low-tech future where a coronal mass ejection broke the US electrical grid and so no one has movies or TV and have to watch live performances of Batman. I had a lot of fun and came up with some good lines, but the ending felt forced and the story felt rambling.
The second story sprouted out of a dream. I had a dream once that my cat got a job distributing salt and pepper packets to fast food chains. But he was just a cat, so he called me in a panic and I had to go help him. (He was just a cat, after all). This story turned out to be my favorite of the two, and I feel like it was more authentically my voice and style. But it did something that I didn’t expect. It went and wrote itself and the end product wasn’t at all funny like the original concept I’d started with. In fact it was really effing sad. I think it’s the saddest most wretched thing I’ve ever written, but I really like it.
In both cases I injected something foreign into my writing (a dream, or a story framework). I feel like it helped my writing and both were useful exercises.
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The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Written
I haven’t participated in NaNoWriMo since 2012, but I’m still reaping the writing rewards of that one year.
My fiction before that NaNoWriMo had been mostly successful. All of my plays were awarded staged readings and most of my short stories got published. Of course, I had only written two plays and three short stories over the course of 11 years. Five things total. I was a 29 year old woman who had wanted to write fiction all my life, but I just didn’t do it.
It would have been embarrassing to turn out something from my own imagination that was imperfect and less than brilliant. And so I didn’t write fiction. I wrote news articles, academic papers, and grant proposals successfully. After all I could write, but those weren’t pieces of my Very Own Personal imagination on display, so I felt less exposed.
In 2012 I could see my 30th birthday approaching and I had always thought that I would have finished my first novel before I was 30. Still just the two plays and three short stories. So I jumped on the NaNoWriMo bandwagon.
Writing for a word count taught me to just keep going. My novel was wretched. I did have a couple of moments of brilliant extemporizing that were exhilarating, especially so since I am an avid plotter and in no way shape or form a seat-of-your-pants writer. But mostly it was horrible.
I found it freeing to have written something horrible. Whatever I wrote next couldn’t possibly be the worst thing I’ve ever written. Nope. That was my NaNo Novel. Crown taken.
So, I have learned to keep going through painful stories, through half formed ideas, bad plots, weak characters, etc. I have decided that I can learn nothing from stories I don’t write. And so, whenever I can make time for my fiction hobby, I write. I’m getting better, too.
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Cheering from the sidelines
I am not doing NaNoWriMo, and it feels like I’m opting out of a big party in order to study or something. (more…)
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Harvest Party
Hansen Calloway looks up from hammering the last electrical spike into the rich earth of his family’s cemetery to see the sultry, raven-haired Sarai Blackriver heft a bloody cow haunch over the stone fence. She blows him a kiss before disappearing into the nearby woods.
“What the Hell?” Hansen calls after her. He is wondering how the tiny woman is even strong enough to lift that much cow when a shriek sounds overhead. Turkey vultures circle gracefully in the crisp autumn sky above him.
Hansen’s normally open and friendly features contract into a lemon-sucking face. So that’s how she wants to play it. Tempting carrion birds to the Calloway family cemetery on Revival Day is dirty. But family feuds have no rules and the Calloway/Blackriver feud is old and bitter. (more…)
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The Blind Poet’s Dog
Everyone who is anyone knows Homer and loves Homer and invites Homer to perform at their Royal drunken feasts. But I know that Homer is a pain in the ass.
Homer is my master, but we cannot simply have a congenial, professional servant/master relationship, oh no. Because Homer says that he is a ‘people person’ and he apparently wants ‘even his manservant’ to feel ‘involved’ in his ‘art.’
So I must listen to him practice his epic poems over and over again. And I must provide an opinion on the practice because Homer always says, “Your opinion is important to me, Argos!”
And I always reply, “I have no opinion, Sir.”
And he most often says, “You know what they say about opinions, Argos.”
And if he says that, I always reply, “Yes I do, Sir.”
But he will always go ahead and say, “Opinions, like a certain something else, are something which everyone has!” And then he will laugh. (more…)
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Super Support Group
The blood forms a red bead on my middle finger as the orderly withdraws the needle and squeezes. He dips a white strip into the drop and pops it into the reader with a click. The reader’s familiar whirr ends in a single beep and a friendly green light as I’d expected. Acceptable levels. But I must intervene when the orderly, who is new, makes no move to replace the used needle.
“You’ve got to discard that one, and get a new one now,” I say helpfully. When he looks skeptically at me, I smile to show him that I am a friendly and good patient and not troublesome.
“Oh.” He replies. “You’re the last one in my line so it doesn’t matter.” He looks down before he can see my face sour. This one is too lazy for safety, it seems. What would it matter to him if some Obuny Syndrome patient gets a contaminated needle?
I open my mouth to say something when the alarmed shrieking of a red, unsafe levels light sounds. I turn to the other line of patients across the cafeteria’s dining room. There, shirtless, braless, with a wholly tattooed torso and a Mohawk—bright blue this week—is Darvey. She is laughing, of course. (more…)
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The Cat Came Back
My cell phone rang at two minutes of four in the morning. I swiped my thumb across the green ‘answer’ button, put the phone to my ear and grunted.
“Meow?” came the reply. It was my cat.
“Waffles?” I cleared my throat and sat up. I hadn’t heard from my cat in two months.
“Meow.” She sounded sad and exhausted and I could guess why. She’d gotten herself a job and apparently she was—predictably—in over her head. (more…)